First, on a BIOS machine the stick does not boot at all, the computer sees it as nonbootable
Second, booting on an UEFI computer goes fine until I get to "login", there it stops.

There is an error message on both; "Secondary GPT header is not in the last LBA". The checksum for the image was OK, I have tried two different sticks, written the image four times, which does not help. I intend to install GhostBSD on the BIOS computer, where I now have 11 alpha, which installed from USB without any problem, and has kept running since then without any problem with the system.

Only the EFI partition is set bootable on the image, could that be the problem?

PelleB wrote:First, on a BIOS machine the stick does not boot at all, the computer sees it as nonbootable

Can you please detail which hw is that ? Maker/model ?
Because booting on BIOS HW worked for me, both from USB and from DVD, so there must be something specific to your hardware.

Second, booting on an UEFI computer goes fine until I get to "login", there it stops.

Is that a "text login" or a "graphical login" ?

There is an error message on both; "Secondary GPT header is not in the last LBA". The checksum for the image was OK, I have tried two different sticks, written the image four times, which does not help.

You can safely ignore the above warning, it happens because the ISO image is smaller than your USB device, and the secondary GPT is written at the end of the ISO image and not at the end of the USB device, nothing to worry about.

I intend to install GhostBSD on the BIOS computer, where I now have 11 alpha, which installed from USB without any problem, and has kept running since then without any problem with the system.

Beside that, because you have 11.1-alpha installed, you can simply upgrade your system and what you will get will be the same as 11-1-rc1. (The differences in 11.1-rc1 are mainly about the installer and ZFS setup).

Only the EFI partition is set bootable on the image, could that be the problem?

No, because the ISO image use grub for booting, and grub ignore the boot flag on the partitions.

The login in the UEFI computer is the text login, but I do not intend to install GhostBSD there, at least not now. I could not find what username and password to use for a live session, so I stopped there.

The Alpha is 11.0, not 11.1, installed without any problems from an USB-stick and it has been running without any problems since. Good to know that I can neglect the GPT warning and partition flags! I will try the Beta image as soon as I get back from work in the morning .

Things start to clarify themselves because it appears we are looking at differences between 11.0-alpha and 11.1-rc1;
what changed between the two ?
about the boot, we implemented a (temporary) workaround to a bug which was affecting xorriso (a tool we use to build our ISO hybrid images); the xorriso's bug was solved recently but the fixed version is not yet in ports/packages.

The bug prevented to build images with UEFI support, for this reason 11.0-alpha was released without UEFI support;
in 11.1-all we applied a workaround after we discovered the bug was related to hfsplus support (Apple specific) and that is the only difference that come to my mind, yet remain to be verified if it is the cause of your boot issue.

About the text login: what it means is that X server is failing to start, most likely this is due to a change that was implemented upstream in Xorg (approximately February/March 2017) when they changed the hw detection causing several problems (mainly to intel i915 graphics) .. but probably hit your nvidia system too.

You can login by using the username "ghostbsd" or "root" (no password) and then look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log for further info about the X server failure.

EDIT:

on most system you can install and run dmidecode to look at the bios data:

I found the problem with the BIOS computer, the Acer. I thought "removable" in the boot menu meant USB, but no, the USB is a hard disk and thus found under "harddisk" in the boot menu...

Succesfully installed on the Acer.

On the other one (Lenovo 50-55) I tried to boot again and get the error messages "(WW) NV Ignoring unsupported device 0x10de1287 (GK208B) [GeForce GT730] at 01@00:00:0" and lower down " Fatal server error [51.058] (EE) Cannot run in framebuffer mode Please specify busIDs for all framebuffer devices".

There are two graphic cards, one on the motherboard and one (the GeForce one) attached. I had quite a few problems (using Salix 14.2) with hangings and crashes which disappeared when I changed the settings in the UEFI-thing from automatically select to manual settings. I had the same problems with the Acer computer (using Salix 14.1), but never anything like it with GhostBSD (10.3, 11.0alpha, and since an hour 11.1RC1).

So, as I am not planning to install GhostBSD on the Lenovo right now, the problem is solved. If there is any need for it I can experiment with the Lenovo, maybe it is useful for improving something on the final release.

PelleB wrote:I found the problem with the BIOS computer, the Acer. I thought "removable" in the boot menu meant USB, but no, the USB is a hard disk and thus found under "harddisk" in the boot menu...

Succesfully installed on the Acer.

Good!

On the other one (Lenovo 50-55) I tried to boot again and get the error messages "(WW) NV Ignoring unsupported device 0x10de1287 (GK208B) [GeForce GT730] at 01@00:00:0" and lower down " Fatal server error [51.058] (EE) Cannot run in framebuffer mode Please specify busIDs for all framebuffer devices".

There are two graphic cards, one on the motherboard and one (the GeForce one) attached. I had quite a few problems (using Salix 14.2) with hangings and crashes which disappeared when I changed the settings in the UEFI-thing from automatically select to manual settings. I had the same problems with the Acer computer (using Salix 14.1), but never anything like it with GhostBSD (10.3, 11.0alpha, and since an hour 11.1RC1).

So, as I am not planning to install GhostBSD on the Lenovo right now, the problem is solved. If there is any need for it I can experiment with the Lenovo, maybe it is useful for improving something on the final release.

No need for testing, but thanks. As I wrote before that failure depend from Xorg itself, and it affect the live media.

For those that may read the thread and experiencing a similar issue, there can be a workaround, like running X on top of vesa driver, and once the system is installed the issue can be solved installing the proprietary nvidia drivers.